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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. What does the narrator compare the dead woman's hair to?
2. Why does Gin tell the narrator "Stop" when they are just about to have sex (236)?
3. In the story's opening, what details are related to the passage of time?
4. Who is the author of "We Didn't"?
5. What does Gin mean when she tells the narrator that she knows the dead woman?
Short Essay Questions
1. What does the narrator say might have happened if the dead woman had washed up beside them while he and Gin were trying to have sex on the beach, and why is Gin so offended?
2. What is the rhetorical effect of the diction used in the following description of the setting at Oak Street Beach: "The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed" (234)?
3. What messages about gender, sex, and adulthood are being conveyed in the phrase "entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life," which the narrator uses to describe his beliefs about what is happening on the beach that night?
4. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?
5. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?
6. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?
7. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?
8. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?
9. What is the rhetorical purpose of the narrator's comments about the "bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity" (235)?
10. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Why do you think that Dybek chose to express his ideas about how environment can limit opportunity through the story of two frustrated adolescent lovers? Write an essay that explores other choices Dybek might have made and comes to a conclusion about the advantages of focusing the story on Perry and Gin's failed attempt to have sex.
Essay Topic 2
Dybek borrowed from a famous passage of writing referred to as "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy," which is available online. Research background information on this passage and then read its text. Write an essay in which you demonstrate how and where Dybek's writing in "We Didn't" has been influenced by Molly Bloom's Soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses. Then, based on your background research, make and defend a claim about the appropriateness of this borrowing. Be sure to support your claims with quoted evidence from the text of both "We Didn't" and Ulysses, and cite your sources in MLA format.
Essay Topic 3
Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the narrator's depiction of the female body. How does his language reveal his attitudes about women and their bodies? How does this attitude toward women's bodies characterize the narrator? Use quoted textual evidence to support your ideas.
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This section contains 1,294 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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